Will Washington Politics Kill The US Energy Revival And Shale Gas Revolution?

Jon Entine
, ContributorI write skeptically about science, public policy, media and NGOs.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

New Jersey is emerging as a surprise new battlefield in the debate over shale gas and fracking.

Although there is no gas yet being mined in the state, it’s been one of the major beneficiaries from the economic revival that has rippled across the country.

New Jersey is home to the worlds’ largest industrial gas company, Linde, which little more than a decade ago was facing a bleak future. It supplies carbon dioxide and nitrogen to companies that are developing shale through waterless hydraulic fracturing. Since the fracking technique was perfected, Linde has added hundreds of new jobs and now employs more than 1,000 people. This is just one story among many around the country, as once moribund industrial manufacturing, petrochemical and steel companies have experienced a business resurgence. That’s all happened under the radar—one of the many unexpected benefits as the combination of fracking and horizontal drilling has freed up formerly untapped gas deposits.

Linde’s success—and a surprise finding that New Jersey may have reserves of its own—has suddenly brought the fracking controversy front and center in the state. It has had a ban on fracking, instituted years ago, but it expired in January. There was no push to reenact it because there was no gas to be mined in the state; or at least that’s what was thought. It turns out that a shale gas formation extends from Trenton to the northern reaches of the state—enough, experts now say, to supply New Jersey households with five years of energy.

The Newark Formation as it’s known is relatively small compared to the vast Marcellus reserves in neighboring Pennsylvania and New York. But its discovery raises the possibility of a new flash point in the ongoing ‘war over fracking’. Opponents are pulling out all stops, deriding the economic gains and hyping the alleged dangers even as new independent studies suggest that fracking, while not without environmental challenges, is no more problematic than traditional mining, and its record is improving dramatically.

The economic benefits from the increased supply of shale gas in the Northeast are tangible and growing. Home and industrial energy costs are at an all time low. But while Pennsylvania has embraced its reserves, adding an estimated 250,000 shale related jobs in recent years, New York is entering its sixth year of a fracking moratorium. Although the science community has urged that the moratorium be lifted, Governor Cuomo now finds himself trying to deal with a radioactive issue driven by dedicated ideologues. With the 2016 presidential election in his sites, the Governor now says he will make a ‘final’ determination by the 2014 election—the latest dubious promise after a string of missed deadlines.

The debate over shale gas has intensified in recent weeks in the wake of the release of activist filmmaker Josh Fox’s latest anti-shale gas ‘docu-prop,’ Gasland II. Like the original Gasland film, it revolves around iconic images of homeowners setting ablaze or otherwise getting sick from hydrocarbon-tainted tapwater—brazenly implying that it’s caused by methane and other chemicals leaked as the result of hydraulic fracturing.

What Fox does not tell you is that methane leaks naturally at the locations where he filmed. Pictures of flaming faucets and springs caused by leaking methane have been around for decades, well before fracking arrived on the scene—one of dozens of factual missteps in Fox’s films. In fact, as NPR has reported, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protections explicitly investigated and rejected Fox’s allegation, reprised in Gasland II, that flaming water in Dimock, Pennsylvania was the result of fracked wells.

Among his other claims, Fox contends, erroneously, that the oil and gas industry is exempt from the federal clean air and clean water acts (the so-called Halliburton Loophole, a charge found to be fallacious). Many of Fox’s more outlandish allegations are addressed in FrackNation, a documentary directed by Phelim McAleer, who raised money for the film through crowd sourcing fundraising site Kickstarter.

“Flammable water is a great story.” McAleer has said. “Flammable water caused by an evil oil company—an even better story. But when you examine it, it’s just not true. I think there are journalists that are ideologically inclined to disbelieving everything an oil company says. So mix in the desire to tell a great story with the desire to believe environmentalists always tell the truth and journalism has not come out well in the fracking movement.”

DOE finds fracking innocent

Within days of the July airing of Gasland II on HBO, the Department of Energy released a landmark federal study on hydraulic fracturing that eviscerates a central premise of Fox’s movie and the anti-fracking movement. In the first independent assessment of whether shale gas drilling poses a toxic threat to groundwater, DOE researchers monitored wells in western Pennsylvania for a full year. They tagged fracking chemicals with unique markers and found that none migrated from gas bores or man-made fractures into water supplies.

“This is good news,” said Duke University scientist Robert Jackson, who was not involved with the study. Aquifers are usually found at depths of less than 500 feet. The researchers found no evidence of fracking fluids at 5,000 feet or less, indicating the fracking process comes with a huge safety cushion, at least in Pennsylvania.

Anti-shale gas campaigners have built their case around allegations that the mix of chemicals used in the fracking process—almost all water (90 percent) and sand (9.5%)—is a toxic time bomb ready to blow and pollute water supplies across the nation. Jackson, respected for his independence, has overseen numerous studies at fracking sites around the country, and has yet to find any evidence of contamination by fracking fluids.

The study also disposed of another oft expressed fear pushed by Fox and radical environmental justice groups: seismic monitoring determined that fractures subject to earthquakes got nowhere near aquifers or the surface, as they had claimed was likely.

While such reassuring findings are unlikely to quell protests, more responsible environmentalists, such as Scott Anderson, a drilling expert with the Environmental Defense Fund, found the study reassuring. “Very few people think that fracking at significant depths routinely leads to water contamination,” Anderson told the Associated Press.